Suggestions

Trades you do not hold yet. A scan runs over a watchlist of names, builds the candidate structures the chain allows, and ranks what survives its filters. This is the page most likely to be misread, so it is worth being precise about what a row is.

A suggestion is a candidate, not a recommendation It means: this structure exists, it passed the filters, and here is what the model thinks it is worth. It does not mean the trade is good, that the name is attractive, or that now is the time. Nothing on this page knows where the market is going.

The Suggestions panel: the strategy it scans for, a volatility regime reading, and a NO_ACTION verdict saying no symbol passed the entry filters. — A scan that found nothing, which is the common case and worth showing. It names the strategy it looks for, reads the volatility regime, and then says plainly that nothing qualified today — rather than padding the page with the least-bad candidate.

What a row contains

When something does qualify, each row carries:

The structure — the legs, their strikes and the expiry, priced at the chain's current values.
Credit or debit — what opening it pays you or costs you.
Risk — the maximum loss if it goes entirely wrong, in whole-position dollars.
The odds — how often the structure finishes profitable across the simulated paths, with the median outcome and the tails.

What the odds actually mean

The probability comes from running the trade across a few hundred paths drawn by resampling that name's own historical moves, and valuing each option at its own expiry. A row reading profitable on 183 of 256 means exactly that and nothing more.

Use the odds across different trades, not between similar ones The ordering is informative when the positions being compared are genuinely different — a covered call against a spread against a diagonal. Between two variants of the same structure a strike apart, the difference in probability is smaller than the model's own error, and reading it as a ranking is reading noise.

The path a suggestion is measured on

A suggestion opens its what-if on the median path — the middle outcome, with a modest upward drift, which is the honest default for "what does this normally do". Earlier versions defaulted to a stress path, which made perfectly ordinary trades look like losers: if you judge every candidate by its bad week, everything is a bad trade.

The stress path still matters; it is just a different question. Fly the same suggestion on stress when you want to know what the drawdown feels like, and on median when you want to know what it usually does.

Fly it before you believe it

Every row has a fly action, which hands the structure to the Flight tab as a fresh position opened at the chain's current prices. This is the single most useful thing on the page: the ranking tells you a trade passed a filter, and the flight tells you what holding it is like — including the middle, where a profitable trade can spend three weeks underwater.

A flight handed over this way can be re-flown on a stress, median or best path from the same starting point, which is a fast way to see the spread of experiences a single trade contains.

Why a suggested trade can still lose money

Because the odds are odds. A structure profitable on 70% of paths loses on 30% of them, and the flight you happened to fly may be one of those. The number to check when this surprises you is not the probability but the median and the tails: a trade with a good win rate and a terrible left tail is a trade whose losses are rare and large, which is a property of the structure rather than a failure of the scan.